Our editor published The Geonomist which won a Californian GreenLight Award, has appeared in both the popular press (e.g., TruthOut) and academic journals (e.g., USC’s Planning and Markets), been interviewed on radio and TV, lobbied officials, testified before the Russian Duma, conducted research (e.g., for Portland’s mass transit agency), and recruited activists and academics to the Forum on Geonomics. A member of the International Society for Ecological Economics and of Mensa, he lives in America’s Pacific Northwest.

Our top elected official called the Constitution just a piece of paper

Merry Memorial Day: The political freedom we’ve known is at risk

May 30 was set aside to remember soldiers. Lets not forget what supposedly they were sent to war to defend. We condense an excerpt from the 2008 book, “Moyers on Democracy”, posted on AlterNet, May 17, 2008. The author is the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.

By Bill Moyers

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience is that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring more improvement. Now all bets are off. The great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power — and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions.

A sense of political impotence pervades the country — believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. The vigor at local levels has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we wont cooperate in shaping our destiny.

Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Coal mining tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit. The stock-market frenzy scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers.

The resultant speculative bubbles, which inevitably burst, leave insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope. Banking and securities regulations were designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators — and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions.

Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.

The compensation of corporate barons soars to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies. As wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing, a shrinking middle class is awash in credit card debt. The rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

When the state becomes the guardian of privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks Lincoln’s belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good”. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served.

When “We the People” — not just a favored few — would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas, our democracy might win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. The notion of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that had changed the lives of masses of common laboring people — but perhaps not forever.

JJS: Work with the clay at hand. America is a mass market, Americans are mass consumers. What might appeal to them, reform-wise, is a proposal to de-tax earnings but recover societys surplus — the money we all spend on nature and privilege — then de-subsidize privilege and share our surplus equitably.

Read all about it: humans husband nature!

Good News: Green ideas work — and spread!

Theres a way to dissolve plastic, protecting ocean reefs proves cost-effective, and some local people are moving ahead in applying the polluter-must-pay principle. We trim, blend, and append three 2008 articles: (1) Canadian teen discovers plastic-bag-devouring microbe by Eoin O’Carroll, May 23 in the Christian Science Monitor; (2) Environmental protection vital to reducing natural disaster impact by the World Wildlife Fund, May 19; and (3) US city to charge polluting firms by the BBC, May 22.

by Jeffery J. Smith, May 2008

CSM: A Canadian teenager has come up with a way to get plastic shopping bags, which normally take up to 1,000 years to decompose, to break down in as little as three months. Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old high school student in Waterloo, Canada, reasoned that, because plastic degrades, thered be a microorganism that breaks it down. If that microbe could be identified, you could expose higher concentrations of it to plastic and break it down faster. So Daniel did just that, using ordinary household products. If used on an industrial scale, his microbes would save space in landfills and the lives of millions of wildlife species. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swatch of trash twice the size of Texas, is 80% plastic. For his efforts, Burd won $30,000 in prizes and scholarships.

JJS: See? To make scientific progress, we need not depend upon big firms and spoil them with subsidies. A better bet would be to empower everybody, endow the citizenry with a dividend, so basement inventors can realize their ideas. Others, penny investors augmented by citizens dividends, could combine to invest in groundbreaking ideas, just as now gamblers form syndicates to buy lottery tickets. Plus, schools could lose the regimentation, allow students more latitude, then the creativity of youth might astound us. Meanwhile, some of their elders do have some good ideas — that they even sometimes get employed.

* Human land use changes natural fire regimes and destroys more buildings.

* Deforestation and floodplain development links high rainfall to devastating floods and mudslides. The loss of upwards of 70% of floodplains in the Danube and tributaries increases the frequency and severity of floods.

* When mangroves are removed, dune systems developed, and coastal forests cleared, reefs are damaged, which causes much more damage and loss of life. In the Seychelles, reef destruction and sea level rise has doubled wave energy.

In one success story, the investment of US$1.1 million in mangrove replanting and other measures saves some Vietnamese communities an estimated US$7.3 million a year in sea dyke maintenance. During typhoon Wukong in 2000 the area remained relatively unharmed while neighboring provinces suffered significant loss of life and property.

There have been many international agreements and declarations but to actually protect and stabilize an area calls for setting aside land and sea.

JJS: If an area is to no longer yield bounty or money to local residents, then regional residents should compensate locals for their sacrifice. The way to do that is to recover rents for all the used locations in the region, then use a good portion of that revenue to pay residents a dividend. The size of the dividend normally would be enough to cover housing costs in areas of low land value, such as near areas off limits to extraction. Or, if locals are allowed to use the protected area in sustainable ways, then their harvest plus the dividend should easily be enough to allow locals to live comfortably.

The jurisdiction should also charge polluters, but not use that revenue to fund a dividend. As industry cuts back their emissions, thered be less money for paying shares. Also, If people got money for being polluted, some might choose more pollution. Yes, do charge polluters, but use the money to administer the monitoring of sources, auctioning of permits, and enforcing of standards. One of the most progressive areas in the States is getting such a system up and running.

BBC: The San Francisco Bay Area is no longer waiting for the state or nation to act. Their Air Quality Management District will require businesses in nine counties to pay fees for the amount of carbon dioxide they emit. The rules, the first of their kind in the US, are due to come into effect July 1. Companies will have to measure and report their own emissions before being charged 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide. The biggest payers will be a handful of power plants and oil refineries. The charges are expected to generate some $1.1m in their first year. The Bay Area is home to some seven million people and is among the wealthiest regions of the US.

JJS: And for that reason, some of the most expensive real estate in the nation, if not the world. If that region were to recover their site values, imagine the size of a rent dividend they each could receive! Enjoying the material security, local inventors might very well unleash a second silicon revolution.

While education is necessary, is it sufficient?

Africa Must Produce or Perish

We trim and append this 2008 Africa Day speech by a native Nigerian delivered in Spain. The author won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize of supercomputing.

by Philip Emeagwali

Imagine that it is May 25, 2063, the 100th anniversary of Africa Day, a day for reflecting on Africas successes and failures. The newspaper headline announces, Last Remaining Oilfield in West Africas American Territory Dries Up.

The article continues: The last patch of rainforest will soon be empty land scarred by oil pipelines, pumping stations, and natural gas refineries. Wholesale pollution will be the environmental legacy for future generations.

Africas offshore oil reserves will ebb away. Abandoned oil wells could well become tourist attractions, and oil-boom settlements will be transformed into derelict ghost towns.

We know oil exists in limited quantities and that most oil wells dry up after 40 years. It is as certain as death and taxes. Rather than debate the exact year when we will run out of oil, imagine that we have already run out. We should ask, When will Africa be unable to export raw materials, either for lack of our own oil or because foreign markets have themselves dried up?

A $100 bar of raw iron is worth $200 when forged into drinking cups in Africa, $65,000 when forged into needles in Asia, $5 million when forged into watch springs in Europe. How can this be? European intellectual capital — the collective knowledge of its people — allows a $100 raw iron bar to command a 50,000-fold increase!

Without African intellectual capital, iron excavated in Africa will continue to be manufactured in Europe and exported back to Africa at enormous cost. Africa needs to cultivate creative and intellectual abilities that will allow it to increase the value of its raw materials. Selling value-added goods helps break the continents vicious cycle of poverty.

In oil-exporting African nations, multinationals such as Shell (selling rigs for a 40% royalty on exported oil) are getting rich, while the oil rig workers remain poor. Instead of addressing the underlying causes of poverty, Third World leaders give false hope to their people. We need less talk about poverty and more action to eliminate it.

Education has done more to reduce poverty than all the oil companies in the world. Intellectual capital engenders new technologies which creates new products. The end result will be not just a redistribution of wealth, but the creation and control of new wealth.

One catalyst for such prosperity could be telecommuting. If 300 million Africans could work for companies located in the West (just as millions of Indians do), then both regions would benefit. The strategy would be to recognize the labor needs of the global marketplace, and enable Africa to fulfill those needs.

For decades, power in post-colonial Africa rested in the hands of those with guns, not those with brains. We were not always at war with our neighbors, but we were always at war with poverty. Yet we spent more on guns than on books and bread.

Africas choice is clear: produce or perish. Africa will perish if it continues to consume what it does not produce, and produce what it does not consume. We have a golden opportunity to use the trillion dollars earned by exporting natural resources to break Africas cycle of poverty.

When we do that, Africa will finally be eating the fruits of its own labor. My wish is that by the end of the 21st century high-end products in New York City will sport the label: Made in Africa. And, like a rainforest renewed, Africa will flourish again.

JJS: This restates the old, teach a man to fish  However, most poor people know how to fish (or could easily learn). What they lack is access to the fishing hole.

Of course poor people lack skills, but more fundamental they lack of access to land, locations for both agriculture and extraction. Where government collects rent — the annual rental value of land — there owners do not hoard land. With a greater supply of available land, there locations are affordable for all users.

Public recovery of rent has worked wherever tried. Able to produce for themselves, families climb out of poverty and educate their children. Then the cycle the author sees can begin, on a basis of just land tenure.

What if Left and Right are both wrong?

It’s Our Turn Now

We update housing prices, 30 something debt, and federal debt and post a 2008 article on the failure of the 00s to deliver the goods from the Huffington Post, May 18; its author is with the Economic Policy Institute.

by Jared Bernstein

JJS: Records keep getting topped. From Q1 of 2007 to Q1 of 08, home prices fell 3.1% (a seasonally adjusted 1.7%). Its the largest decline in the official OFHEO index’s 17-year history, fitting in nicely with the 18-year land-price cycle.

Less spendy housing might give Gen Xers who’re not homeowners hope. Three-fourths of consumers in their 20s and nine out of 10 consumers in their 30s are in debt. About 20% in their 30s are paying college loans; the median balance exceeds $13,000. They have more debt and less to repay it with. The median income for men in their 30s is 12% lower than what their dads earned three decades earlier.

Gen X debt pales beside federal debt. Last years official deficit was $162 billion but add in the money needed for new people eligible for benefits and it grows to $2.5 trillion. To cover the lifetime benefits of everyone eligible for Medicare, Social Security and other government programs, the US needs a record $57.3 trillion, nearly $500,000 per household over the course of a few decades. Add the obligations of state and local governments and the total rises to $61.7 trillion — $531,472 per household. That is more than four times what Americans owe in personal debt such as mortgages.

Rather than even try to pay benefits to some, we could replace such programs and their high overhead costs of bureaucracy with a dividend to everyone. Plus, we should cut military spending, quit being an empire, and save ourselves trillions. Couple those savings with revenue from charging rent for land, resources, EM spectrum, and other natural advantages. At the same time, de-tax income, sales, and buildings; de-taxing lets the value of locations rise. Then collect all that immense site value into the public treasury — wed easily have a surplus to pay ourselves a dividend.

The commentator weve chosen for today sees only left and right; hence he misses how we can transform the whole system, but he does present compelling data with tongue in cheek.

Bernstein: During Bush, we turned every branch of Federal government, including the judiciary, over to conservatives with a unified vision of the economy, dubbed YOYO (you’re on your own) economics — on your own unless you’ve got friends in high places; in that case, you can plunder the treasury.

What are the economic outcomes of this neocon power grab? Rank all 10 business cycles since WWII (1949). You find that the 2000s (01-07) rank eighth in GDP, ninth in consumption spending and employment growth, and last in labor compensation, last in the ratio of the population employed, and last in average growth of investment, which was less than half of the post-WWII average and worse than all cycles in the last 50 years.

Corporate profits were the only area of strength in the latest cycle, ranking 2nd strongest among the last 10 cycles. On the other hand, for the first time on record, going back to the mid-1940s, the income of the typical, middle-income family was slightly lower last year than at the prior peak in 2000. Outside of the top 1%, there’s less income growth than in any past business cycle. Going back to 1913, income is now more concentrated among the top 1% of households than in any other year, bar one: 1928.

Using government to further privilege rather than defend rights has led to fatal incompetence, a massive housing bubble, ailing global credit markets, and near recession for the US. The “ownership society” is a cruel joke: homeownership rates are falling for the first time in decades. Toss in dollar decline and rising inflation.

They’ve had their turn and they’ve failed. It is our turn now.

JJS: To likewise fail, the way paved by good intentions? The Left fails to see what it means to be fully human, to need play as well as work. People dont need politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in legitimate business. We need government only to defend rights, primarily our rights to our earnings, untaxed, to a fair share of Earths worth, and to a planet in good health. With rights upheld, the economy takes care of itself.

What greens have been saying all along is true

Companies discover going green pays off

You have a harder time avoiding mainstream media than finding it; hence we focus on the news you might miss. But this proof of the world working right for everyone needs widespread dissemination. Hence we run this 2008 USA Today article of May 21 — and append how to adopt apt-tech more rapidly.

By Edward Iwata

San Francisco. A growing wave of companies in all sectors — technology, financial services, energy, retail, manufacturing — are embracing environmentally safe practices and saving hundreds of millions of dollars, according to corporate leaders and an environmental group’s report Tuesday.

SunPower (STI), Sierra Nevada Brewing, Patagonia, Ikea, Nike (NKE), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), UPS (UPS), Yahoo (YHOO) and others are using green practices in their work sites, in product development and packaging, in energy-saving data centers and other technology, according to a report by the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund.

The report was released here at a news conference featuring green-friendly CEOs and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Technology giant Sun Microsystems (JAVA), for one, aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2012 through a range of practices, from using cooler, energy-saving technology in its computer chips to allowing thousands of its 18,000 employees to work at home.

Permitting employees to telecommute has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in the past six years in real estate and fuel costs. Sun also hauled in $1 billion in revenue last year on its Niagara 1 server computer system, which uses power-saving chips.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz calls the technology “a bus” that gets the job done efficiently and economically, rather than a flashy, gas-guzzling Ferrari.

Fireman’s Fund Insurance offers its commercial customers insurance policies promising their property, if destroyed by fire or disaster, will be rebuilt using green materials, heating and lighting.

The policies, which are growing quickly in popularity among Fireman’s clients, will be available to homeowners in June, according to Chairman Charles Kavitsky.

One clear sign that the product is making money: Competitors are imitating it, Kavitsky says.

Schwarzenegger said green companies and environmentally friendly laws in California — such as its Million Solar Roofs Plan, which provides an energy-bill credit for homeowners and building owners to install solar systems — will lead by example.

“Are we going to wipe out global warming? Of course not,” Schwarzenegger said. “But we’re inspiring the rest of the world to do the same thing.”

JJS: All along, the problem has not been technology — most of the ideas cited above have been around for decades if not longer. No, the stumbling block has been psychology, the false belief that wealth and Earth must conflict. That pessimistic outlook is typical of peasants, of people lower in their social hierarchy. Too many believe they dont deserve whats right or good. However, in more egalitarian societies, you find more optimism; people take harmony for granted.

So, how do we level the playing field in society? We share societys surplus. We recover and share publicly generated value, like all the money we spend on the nature we use. Also, we dont treat people like peons; we quit taxing their property, their earnings, their businesses and sales — wed no longer have to as long as we use taxes, fees, dues, and leases to redirect that natural rent into the public treasury. Then, freed from the yoke of the state, people can see themselves as more than just taxpayers but as free and responsible members of society able to contribute goods and services of real value. Those are the kind of people willing to try new ideas and to do whats right for everyone.

Even without changing peoples worldview, the shift of taxes off the values we make, onto the values we create, would help the cause of apt-tech. Paying taxes is harder for some start-up trying to sell new ideas than for an entrenched business. And its the outmoded, entrenched businesses who get most of the subsidies. For the sake of the planet, we need to shift subsidies, too, from special interests to everyone — which is where the sharing of rents comes in.

Like a poor nation, Americans again consume their own waste

Honeybees abandon hives, sewage overflows — hows our environment?

Hows our environment doing? How can we reduce our impact? We trim, blend, and append three 2008 articles: (1) Survey shows rise in US honeybee deaths by the AP, May 7; (2) Aging systems releasing sewage into rivers, streams by USA Today, May 8; and (3) A Green Rx to save carbon: City Density + Transit by Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group, May 5. AP: Since last year, 36.1% of the nation’s commercially managed hives have died. Last year, 32% died. Bees are succumbing to pesticide drift, new diseases, and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite.

While two years are not a trend, the situation is not improving. Imagine if one out of every three rivers or herds or cities were wiped out in just one year. People might leap to fix the problem.

JJS: Were losing whats beautiful and gaining whats ugly.

USA Today: About 850 billion gallons of storm water mixed with raw sewage pours from US sewers — designed to release overflow during heavy rains — into rivers and lakes each year. The sewage systems — some of which are more than 100 years old — snake under America for 1.2 million miles. An additional 3 billion to 10 billion gallons of raw sewage spill accidentally every year.

Causes of these spills include improper connections, clogs from debris, construction accidents, and cracks in aging pipes.

 In March, 700,000 to 1.3 million gallons of human feces and other waste spilled from a damaged pipe into Grand Lagoon at Panama City Beach, Fla.

 In January, about 20 million gallons of sewage flowed into Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River after a 42-inch pipe ruptured near Reading.

 Also in January, heavy rain, deteriorating pipes, and operator error sent about 5 million gallons of sewage into Northern California’s Richardson and San Francisco bays.

Legislation that would require sewer authorities to notify the public of overflows and spills is pending in Congress. As many as 5,500 people get sick every year from direct exposure to sewer overflows near beaches.

At least one-third of the nation’s large, publicly owned sewage treatment systems were the subject of enforcement actions by the EPA or state regulators for violations. Those enforcements included fines as well as orders to fix problems or expand treatment capacity. Cities with the largest fines included San Diego ($6.2 million), New York ($3 million) and Los Angeles ($1.6 million).

The cost to upgrade the nation’s municipal sewers ranges from $350 billion to $500 billion for the next 20 years.

JJS: Once we accept sewage as a resource, as a natural fertilizer, part of the natural cycle, we wont waste waste. Now were pumping topsoil through our bodies then into the ocean. We can do better than that, and the fish will thank us.

The way to pay for building or expanding a sewage system is to recover the increase in nearby land values, since clean water makes nearby land more valuable to residents. The way to pay for operating the system is by charging users a fee big enough to cover ongoing (not capital) costs. This financing method works for any large public works project, including mass transit.

Peirce: A century ago we were celebrating streetcars and subways. Today, to reduce gasoline consumption and spare the environment, people must take trains, buses, mini-buses, plus bikepaths and sidewalks. For people to conveniently switch from driving to riding, point A and point B need to be closer; a higher density of offices and residences is necessary. But be careful; replacing old smaller buildings with new larger ones could reduce efficiency.

Cars, trucks, and airplanes account for 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions, construction and operation of buildings for 48%, almost twice as much. Instead of replacing heat-leaking buildings, if we rehabilitate them wed save energy. Even if a new project includes 40% recycled materials, it takes some 65 years for a green-energy-efficient office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing and replacing an existing building.

To finance energy savings, several major lenders are developing ways to let office building owners upgrade to efficient furnaces, windows, insulation, etc with virtually zero up-front expense. The costs are automatically paid through subsequent energy savings. Homeowners could use a parallel plan.

But how do we afford public transit expansion? Is the answer a massive war-to-peace transition? Some basic truths require our careful attention. In decades to come, we could be mourning the wholesome environment we could have had.

JJS: Already Im mourning a third of the honeybees who abandon their hives to die. Pay careful attention to this basic truth: to spare Earths beauty, we must share her bounty, to care for her health, we must share her worth.

The people triumphed over the media, a wall blocking discourse

Is the solution to use this new technology to talk among ourselves, inform ourselves, create reliable networks, making the old channels irrelevant? Link up and lets find out.

The author is an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, was released this spring via home-video outlets including Netflix.

by Norman Solomon

For a long time, the nation’s body politic has been shoved up against a wall — known as the news media.

Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, or the words “bitter” and “cling,” or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall’s surfaces are more rigid when they’re less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.

“We’ve already seen it,” Obama said, “the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.”

And how, they’ve played along. From the front pages of “quality” dailies to the reportage of NPR’s drive-time news to the blather-driven handicapping on cable television, the ways that media structures have functioned in recent weeks tell us — yet again — how fleeting any media attention to substance can be.

News outlets spun about, as Obama-mania about a longshot candidate morphed into Obama-phobia toward the candidate most likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The man who could do little wrong became a man who could do little right. The lines of attack were spurious and protracted enough to be jaw-dropping.

But can we be truly shocked by such media patterns? Perennial corporate structures are reinforcing the narrow boundaries.

If this sounds like an old complaint, it is. Institutional dynamics — fueled and steered by ownership, advertising, underwriting, and undue government influence — repeat themselves with endless permutations. Dominant media routinely focus on counterfeit issues, ignoring or trashing progressive options in the process.

From George McGovern to Gary Hart to Michael Dukakis to Al Gore to Howard Dean to John Kerry, a long line of Democratic contenders with a chance to become president have been whipsawed by cartoonish images or bogus “issues,” incubated by the right wing and fully hatched by the mass media. The slightest progressive wrinkles of even the starchiest corporate Democrats have been ironed out by media steamrollers.

In recent months, as Barack Obama broke from the pack of contenders, the news media became stainless-steel accessories to the “kitchen sink” politics of smear and fear.

The media pretense of being a fly on the wall has often been preposterous. In the real world of politics — where power brokers and manipulators proceed with the cynical axiom that perception is reality — the fly on the wall is the wall. The political press corps is not observing reality as much as redefining it while obstructing outlooks and constraining public perceptions.

We’re still up against the media wall. Yet, in North Carolina and Indiana where voters came out ahead, that wall wasn’t quite as high or mighty. And the nation might be able to see a little more clearly beyond it.

JJS: Politics is the path to economic justice; laws need to be passed to implement policy. But politics without the goal of losing subsidies and taxes in favor of sharing society’s surplus equitably seems at best spinning its wheels and at worst abusing power to impose economic injustice. So, do exercise your democratic rights however you see fit, but please make sure that sound economic policy is always part of the discussion.

The Chinese have trillions of dollars, the Muslims have the most gold

Can a foreign power take advantage of a weak dollar?

As America sinks deeper into debt, worried investors have been trading in dollars for other currencies. Less demand has dropped the value of the dollar. Does that warn of trouble ahead? The author is the author of Terror Incorporated and Insurgent Iraq and Rogue Economics: the economics of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities worldwide. As Chairman of the countering terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, she brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combating the financing of terror networks. She is a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins Universitys Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics and was interviewed by Newsweek.com.

by Loretta Napoleoni

A weak dollar benefits some Americans. When euros, for example, can buy more American products, US exporters do more business. Since 2002 the euro appreciated from 0.86 to almost 1.60 dollars. The United States have regained second place among exporters, after China, a position that they had lost soon after Bush came to power. Meanwhile, the only European exports to grow in recent years are luxury items — from Gucci bags to Swedish yachts — thanks to the appetites of nouveau riche everywhere.

Because petroleum is denominated in dollars, Americans are hit almost daily by the rise in petrol. At the last OPEC meeting, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez pointed out the dollar now buys less in order to convince the cartel to denominate oil prices in euros. Since 2000, Iran has been quoting its crude exports in euros — while taking payments in dollars. Why? When Iran imports wheat and fertilizers from Ukraine or Russia, it must pay in dollars, not in euros. Exporting in euros and importing in dollars would add the exchange rate cost.

An OPEC decision to denominate exports in euros would increase demand for euros and there are not enough euros in circulation to satisfy it. European central banks would have to print more money and risk inflation or do nothing and let the euro appreciate. Either way, the adjustment period would be lengthy and putting currencies in flux would make balance of payments difficult.

In the vaults of its central bank, China has about 1.4 trillion dollars, followed by Japan with about 1 trillion. China is the largest exporter to America and America is the largest importer of Chinese goods. For the last three years Washington has been pressuring Beijing to revalue its yuan vis-à-vis the dollar without success. US imports from China declined and Chinese exports to the rest of the world rose.

The dollar standard was born in 1971, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods Accord, which had been signed in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Since then the greenback and the western monetary system have been in crisis at least twice every decade.

There is an inverse relationship between the dollar and gold; if the former drops then the latter increases. Close to $1,000 per ounce, gold has risen to levels not seen since the 1980s when Reagans America was in recession. The rise in gold is also due to uncertainty in major markets, gold being the preferred asset in times of crisis.

In the past, when all currencies were linked to gold whose value was fixed, the more a country exported the more gold flowed into their reserves and therefore the more their currency appreciated, and vice-versa. The gold standard lasted a hundred years, until the beginning of World War I. It marked a period of unprecedented economic growth for the West and also for the Orient.

Until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, the Islamic trading currency was the Gold Dinar. It lasted 13 centuries, much longer than the dollar. Today the oil producing countries, in particular those in the Arab world, hold the greatest gold reserves.

In 2001 Malaysia tried to reintroduce the Gold Dinar as the reference currency for central banks in Muslim countries. Prime Minister Mahathir hoped that by 2003 at least 10 of the 57 member states of the Islamic Conference Organization would have subscribed to this system. The effort failed for several reasons, amongst which the opposition from Washington managed to convince the IMF to prohibit its member states from re-linking their own currencies to gold.

Any country willing to use gold would not need vast quantities of bullion. It would be sufficient to link the currency to the price of gold mining shares and to use the fluctuations in the metal to regulate its value and exchange rate. This technique was used in the newborn United States of America; at the time, the young republic had no gold reserves.

Some day, competition from Islamic finance ministers might force US politicians to re-stabilize the dollar, possibly retreat to a gold standard.

JJS: Or, if the American people are lucky, policymakers could advance to a rational use of debt. Then theyd borrow only to afford long-term projects, like infrastructure, which augment the nations value. US currency would once again be as sound as, well, a dollar.

Workers cant avoid it while the rich who work out can

Millions of Employees in Chronic Pain

Too many people work too much, don’t make enough, and live in sickening environments. So charge polluters, don’t tax earnings, and share society’s surplus so people can extend and enjoy leisure. We reprint this 2008 article from TIME on May 2.

By Kathleen Kingsbury

Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20% of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8% of people in households earning above $100,000, according to a landmark study on how Americans experience in pain.

The findings, published in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn’t finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates.

“To a significant extent, pain does separate the classes,” says Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who authored the study along with Dr. Arthur Stone, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University.

Krueger notes that the type of pain people reported typically fell on either side of the rich-poor divide. “Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,” he says. “At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.”

Krueger and Stone found that blue-collar workers felt more pain, from physical labor or repetitive motion, while on the job than off, which at least offers hope that the problem can be mitigated. This finding “emphasizes the need for pain preventing measures [in the workplace] such as better ergonomics,” wrote Juha H.O. Turunen, a professor of social pharmacy at Finland’s University of Kuopio, in an accompanying commentary to the report.

JJS: It also emphasizes the need for time off from work, with an income, so people can recover and turn their attention to other activities important in life. People could recuperate and enjoy life if they got an income apart from work, such as a dividend paid to citizens from surplus public revenue collected by fees or taxes on rents, on the values of land, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services.

Kingsbury: People with chronic pain also worked less, the new study found, costing US businesses as much as $60 billion annually. These conclusions are in line with previous studies on productivity lost to common pain conditions, including a 2003 report finding that nearly 15% of the US workforce’s output was diminished by ailments such as headaches and arthritis.

What’s new in Kruger and Stone’s study, however, is the level of detail with which the researchers were able to chronicle the lives of Americans in pain. With the help of the polling firm Gallup, they asked nearly 4,000 survey participants to diarize their daily activities over a 24-hour period. From these personal accounts, the researchers saw the impact pain had on people’s emotional states.

Though participants said interacting with a spouse or friend lowered their pain, those suffering chronic pain tended to socialize much less. They also spent a lot more time watching television, about 25% of their day compared with 16% for the average person.

Pain also appeared to be a major driver of healthcare costs. Krueger and Stone found that Americans spent about $2.6 billion in over-the-counter pain medications and another nearly $14 billion on outpatient analgesics in 2004, the most recent data available.

But in these numbers, too, there may be a distinction between the haves and the have-nots. A 2005 study in Michigan showed that minorities and the poor have less access to such drugs than wealthier Americans because local pharmacies don’t stock enough pain medications such as oxycodone or morphine. “Those [pharmacies] in white ZIP codes were more than 13 times more likely to have sufficient supplies,” says lead researcher Dr. Carmen Green, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Michigan. “I have patients who have to drive 30 miles or more just to get their pain medications.”

One characteristic that pain doesn’t seem to distinguish is gender: according to Krueger and Stone’s study, men and women were nearly equally likely to find themselves in pain.

Another is age. People reported more aches and pains as they got older, though surprisingly that pain tended to plateau from ages 45 to 75. “Maybe people reach a point in their career where they move up the ladder into a desk job,” Krueger says. “Or maybe they’ve just learned how to cope with the pain.”

JJS: Given that the pain is work related, and so much work is not to produce wealth but to conform to norms in order to be paid — like telephone solicitors who annoy people during dinner  eliminating senseless work could alleviate excess pain. But before people could enjoy life pain-free, first they must demand a heavy dose of social justice and replace taxes and subsidies with a fair sharing of societys surplus — all the money we spend on all the nature we use.

Some US cities regress while Europe starts charging polluters

As smog worsens, green fees on filthy motors moves ahead

We trim, blend, and append three 2008 articles: (1) State of the Air 2008 by the American Lung Association; (2) Tree-lined streets ‘cut asthma’ by the BBC, May 1; and (3) Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times, April 26. ALA: Almost 125 million Americans — two of every five people in the US — live in counties that have unhealthful levels of either ozone or particle pollution. Some cities — notably Los Angeles and Houston — cut ozone and particle pollution. Many other cities slowed or reversed gains made earlier in the decade. For the first time, a city outside of California — Pittsburgh — topped a list of the most polluted cities.

International shipping also produces large amounts of air pollution. Emissions from these engines seriously worsen national ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxide, and particle pollution levels, especially in ports such as Seattle, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York. Both foreign-flagged as well as US ships must be required to use much cleaner fuels and engines.

JJS: A more effective method than mandating less pollution is to auction off emission permits, a tact that Europe is taking. Planting more trees is how New York plans to improve urban air.

BBC: US rates of childhood asthma soared 50% between 1980 and 2000, with particularly high rates in poor, urban communities. In New York City, 9% of young children have asthma, which is the leading cause of admission to hospital among children under 15. Yet asthma rates among children aged four and five fell by 25% for every extra 343 trees per square kilometer; children who live on tree-lined streets are put at lower risk.

JJS: While planting more trees would likely help, doing so would also make the shaded residences more livable and the locations more desirable, pushing up their site value. That gentrifies the neighborhood, unless the land rent is recovered, often via taxes, and shared, as by paying residents a dividend and/or by lowering other taxes. With taxing locations, another useful levy is taxing pollution, a reform further along in Europe, which is targeting shippers.

Rosenthal: Better transportation networks have reduced the time required to ship food. Improved roads in Africa mean goods go from farms to stores in Europe in 4 days, compared with 10 days not too many years ago.

And with far cheaper labor costs in African nations, Morocco and Egypt have displaced Spain in just a few seasons as important suppliers of tomatoes and salad greens to central Europe.

Some shipping defies logic:

* Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale.

* Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground.

* Britain imports — and exports — 15,000 tons of waffles a year, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia.

Britain, with its short growing season and powerful supermarket chains, imports 95% of its fruit and more than half of its vegetables; food accounts for 25% of truck shipments in Britain. The European Union, the worlds leading food importer, has increased imports 20% in the last five years. The value of fresh fruit and vegetables imported by the United States, in second place, nearly doubled from 2000 to 2006.

The movable feast comes at a cost: pollution. Besides contaminating air and water, transported foods also require layers of packaging and, in the case of perishable food, refrigeration, both of which take energy.

This year the European Commission announced that by 2012 all freight-carrying flights into and out of the European Union would have to purchase permits for the pollution they emit. The commission is negotiating with the global shipping organization, the International Maritime Organization, over various alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions, and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where — for example — storing apples for months would require refrigeration. But those studies were done in New Zealand.

JJS: With imposing charges on polluters, lets not forget to remove subsidies from beneath polluters. Lets not give any more bailouts to airlines or shipping companies; instead, charge full market value for landing slots at airports and docking slots in seaports. Perhaps most basic, lets not build and maintain roads with money from the general fund; instead, pay off road bonds with taxes on nearby land values and pay for maintenance from revenue generated by taxing vehicles. While these charges for taking value are fair and effective in their own right, theyre made more palatable by removing taxes for making value — income, sales, buildings — similarly fair and effective in its own right.

Two writers — one pro-business, one pro-government — redefine recession

Take a look at sales and income and say our economy is doing OK

We trim, blend, and append two 2008 articles: US could have recession without drop in GDP by Rex Nutting, MarketWatch, April 30, and The Myths and Harsh Effects of Bush’s Economic Class War, by Larry Beinhart, AlterNet, posted April 28. Beinhart is the author of “Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin.”Nutting: Last quarter the GDP did grow, barely. Yet what the GDP measures — the output of the economy — can grow while well-being recedes.

For the first quarter, almost all the growth came from inventory growth and exports, with very little increase in either the amount of money individuals or companies earned, or in the things American households and businesses bought. We made a little bit more stuff, but it went into warehouses and onto ships, not into our homes and workplaces.

* Industrial output has stalled over the past six months, even with the weaker dollar boosting exports.

* Inflation-adjusted sales have fallen at a 5.2% annual pace in the past three months and are essentially unchanged from six months ago.

* Payrolls are down by a quarter million jobs in the past four months.

* Final domestic sales fell at a 0.4% annual rate in the quarter, the first decline since 1991 — a year off the 18-year land-price cycle — and a far better assessment of the economy’s health than Q1s 0.6% increase.

* After-tax incomes adjusted for inflation have been stagnant since September, even as the population has grown. The pie is being sliced thinner.

By all of these measures except GDP, a recession is probably in progress.

JJS: And for ordinary Americans, it has been for all the double-os.

Beinhart: The last recession, of 2001, lasted eight months. The economy went into “recovery” by 2003, yet here’s the reality. The recession of 2001 never ended. At least not for ordinary Americans.

From 2001 to 2007, median family income declined from between $500 and $1,000. Median individual income went down by at least $1,000. The number of people in poverty increased from 31.6 million to 36.5 million. The value of America’s businesses as measured by the stock market did not go up. But the cost of living did.

How can rosy reports and the reality be so different? The herd mentality in politics, in the media, and among economists. The key fact is this: the “growth” in the US economy consists entirely of debt.

The national debt in Jan. 2008: $9.2 trillion. The national debt in 2001: $5.7 trillion. An increase of $3.5 trillion.

Combining what we owe as a nation and as individuals, over the last seven years we took on $8.75 trillion in debt. Meanwhile, the economy grew by only $4 trillion.

The real estate bubble is described as the root of our current economic problems. That’s not true. It’s merely a symptom. The problem is that the government and the citizenry have taken on massive amounts of new debt. Without investing it anything productive.

Our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are not profitable except for specific war profiteers; they are drains, endlessly creating more debts. Debts which are kept off the books the way Enron used to do it, or more pertinently, the way George Bush used to do it when he was at Harken Energy.

This is reflected in the fall of the dollar against such currencies as the Euro. The dollar is worth one third less than it was in 2001, pretty much the size of the bubble, one third of the economy. It is also the primary cause of half of the increase in the price of oil. Since oil is priced in dollars, oil producers raised their prices by fifty percent to keep even.

Fixing it requires raising taxes to pay off the government debts. Cutting military spending and ending the War in Iraq will help immensely. More than that, it requires a new intellectual and moral standard that wont spin myths but face facts.

JJS: Ironically, Beinhart also proposes debts he does like, not for guns but butter. Yet debt is debt. What would work to help people would be to, yes, raise taxes but not on the values we create — on income, sales, and buildings — only on the values we take — pollution, depletion, and exclusion from locations. Then, rather than let Bushies spend the public revenue on wars or Beinhart on bureaucracy, pay citizens a dividend so they can afford the services they truly desire.

There is no shortcut, so the sooner we get it right, the better. Housing numbers keep tumbling:

* In February, prices shrank 2.6% compared with January for 20 key cities; prices in the 10-city index fell 2.8%. That’s the fastest monthly price decline in the history of the Case-Shiller index. The pace of decline has accelerated for nine consecutive months. In the past year for the 20 key cities, the decline quickened in February, with prices down a record 12.7%. And they have to fall further.

* The share of U.S. homes owned but sitting empty edged up in the first quarter to a record high 2.9%. To get them sold, owners must lower what theyre asking. (Reuters)

* One in every 194 households received a foreclosure filing last quarter. The number of homes heading toward foreclosure more than doubled in the first quarter from a year earlier, up from 306,722 to 649,917. The latest tally also represents an increase of 23% from the fourth quarter of last year. The most recent quarter marked the seventh consecutive quarter of rising foreclosure activity. Nearly 157,000 properties were repossessed by lenders nationwide during the quarter. (AP, April 29) These houses will lower prices, too.

This return to affordability, geonomists predicted years ago. And its a good thing its happening, too (see our earlier article on how to prevent foreclosure). Once land (what housing sits on) gets affordable again, then the economy can revive again.

A rightist calls for repeal, a leftist looks back on land reform

Wow, did ethanol subsidies ever backfire; will GMOs, too?

Are GMOs a horn of plenty? Another heavy-handed idea, ethanol, is a disaster, pushing up land rent in the States and food prices abroad. We trim, blend, and append four 2008 articles: (1) Montville: Ordinance vote puts spotlight on small town by Tux Turkel, Morning Sentinel, April13; (2) Farm costs eat profits for struggling Michigan farmers by Jennifer Youssef of The Detroit News, April 26; (3) The Corner re: ethanol by Iain Murray, author of A Really Inconvenient Truth, at National Review Online, April 26; and (4) The Hidden Battle to Control the World’s Food Supply by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, on AlterNet April 19. Her interviewee, Raj Patel has worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and has just come out with Stuffed and Starved.Turkel: At their annual town meeting, voters in Montville Maine passed a binding ordinance banning the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. The town of 1,000 residents, which has no school, no store, not even a post office, is the first American community outside California to do this.

Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, refer to plants, animals or microorganisms that are transformed by genetic engineering to make it more resistant to drought or disease, and thereby, if all goes well, increase harvests and avoid famines. But genetic engineering — like DDT, thalidimide, leaded gasoline, and nuclear power in the past — may have unintended, harmful consequences to people, animals, and plants.

JJS: A more basic reform than banning the controversial is to transform limited liability. Presently, anyone who puts worker, consumer, or nature at risk gets the same exoneration as someone who does not impose risk. Instead of charging a mere filing fee for corporate charters, we could charge according to the amount of risk imposed. That would help shift the burden of proof from victim to perpetrator; you wouldn’t have to prove you’ve been sickened, the corporation would have to prove that their alterations of nature for profit are safe.

Meanwhile, GMOs have not yet swollen harvests enough to replace the crops displaced by ethanol subsidies, another questionable idea.

Youssef: In 2005, wheat fetched $2.50 a bushel; in 2008, $4. This year, a large portion of Michigan’s 2008 corn crop already has been sold at prices in the $3-to-$4-a-bushel range, nowhere near the $6 to $13 it’s going for now. The growing use of corn-based ethanol for fuel spurs farmers to divert more of their land to corn. That has reduced the supply of other crops, pushing the prices of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and other crops to record highs.

But now:

* The price of nitrogen fertilizer is about $880 per ton, compared to $375 per ton just two years ago.

* Fuel has gone from $1.35 two years ago, to $2.50 last year to $3.70.

* Repair costs for farm equipment have risen 50% to 70% due to higher steel costs.

* Landlords have raised land rent for tenant farmers.

The greater income is in many cases turning out to be just enough to cover skyrocketing overhead. Farmers are just handling more money.

Murray: There are several factors that have led to the absurdity of us sacrificing food for fuel, and agribusiness rent-seeking is certainly one of them. Environmentalists made it inevitable that corn ethanol would be the first answer picked by politicians. Our national security friends helped them, ignoring the free marketeers’ complaints that increasing hunger was not exactly a stabilizing policy. Let’s do find ways of reducing energy prices, and gas tax holidays probably arent the best ways to do that. But far more important would be to repeal the ethanol mandate.

JJS: On the spending side, lets do end subsidies to the well-connected and instead pay citizens a dividend from recovered natural rents, which would go much further in countrysides where the cost of living is much lower. On the collecting side, if were to tax, lets make sure that taxes dont burden useful effort but instead recover the socially generated values of sites, resources, ecosystems, and EM spectrum. A half century ago in Latin America, a democratic leader tried to take a step in that direction.

Patel: Imagine an hourglass; at the top are millions of farmers who grow food, at the bottom are billions of consumers, and in the middle are a handful of corporations — it’s usually four corporations controlling more than 50% of the market. In tea, for example, one company, Unilever, controls 90% of the market. In that position, you’re able to drive prices down for farmers. Already, farmers and farm workers are the poorest people on the planet.

Then you’re processing the food so that what we end up with is rich in salts, fats, and sugars, tends to make us want to buy more, and makes us obese. In the past, it used to be that the people who were overweight were rich and the people who were hungry were poor. Today, hunger and obesity are both signs that people are unable to control their diets.

In Guatemala, a democratically elected president wanted to institute a basic fair system of taxation; Jacobo Guzman Arbenz wanted to tax the land at a fair market value. Rather than allow that, the United Fruit Company called its friends in the CIA, who instigated a coup. As a result, there was a bloody civil war for forty years; 200,000 people died.

JJS: Large landowners who kill poor peasants in Brazil, Africa, India, and elsewhere, operate from the same assumptions as do even well-meaning homeowners who intend to sell out the family home or homestead for a fat profit. When progressive landowners oppose or fail to support the land tax, they give tacit approval and reinforce the same mindset of selfish claims on land that ultimately lead to murder. The just way to get money from land is not to sell or lease but to share a region’s natural values with a region’s residents.

More voices must make clear that land is a common heritage and her value is for us to share. Once we live by that understanding, then smaller organic farmers can compete with others and grow healthy food for empowered consumers. The former poor, empowered in part by receiving their fair share of natural rents, could afford to eat well.

Ultimately stop the subsidies flow; meanwhile how about

Stopping the weapons flow

The weapons trade may be the most egregious example of what’s wrong with subsidies, with letting politicians decide how to spend public revenue, rather than paying dividends to citizens so they can use the funds for their own real needs. We rerun and add to this 2008 editorial of April 24.

Editors of The Los Angeles Times

It’s a rare moment when three African nations, in an effort to forestall violence, block a shipment of weapons to a neighboring country in political turmoil. It’s perhaps even a historic development when those weapons were sold by a great power and were bound for a government that is not under United Nations sanctions and has every legal right to buy arms — though no moral right to do so.

So let us praise the courageous peoples of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia for refusing to allow the Chinese freighter An Yue Jiang to unload its deadly cargo: 77 tons of rockets, mortars, and ammunition, manufactured by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, purchased by the government of Zimbabwe, and virtually certain to be used by President Robert Mugabe to repress his opposition following an election that he may have lost.

Mugabe’s neighboring leaders had been loath to criticize the former independence fighter even as his reign descended from the merely bad into the abominable.

* South African President Thabo Mbeki did not ask Mugabe to release the disputed election tallies until his own country was flooded with refugees from Mugabe’s violent crackdown. But if Mbeki sympathized with Mugabe, the dockworkers of Durban identified with Mugabe’s victims. They understood that sending the weapons to Zimbabwe would have been the moral equivalent of shipping machetes to Rwanda in 1994, and they refused to unload the cargo.

* Next, an Anglican archbishop asked a South African court not to allow the weapons to be transported to land-locked Zimbabwe. The court agreed, and the Chinese freighter, by now dubbed the Ship of Shame, departed Durban.

* The boat bearing the tools of evil was refused entry by Mozambique and Zambia.

The hosts of the Beijing Olympics should bring home the freighter and its unwanted cargo and reflect on whether China intends to become a compassionate global citizen or the very type of capitalist predator it fought a revolution to defeat.

What is extraordinary about this incident is that African civil society — journalists and judges, human rights groups, and unions, backed by U.S. and British diplomats wisely working behind the scenes — made it palatable for these African governments to do the right thing. They have shown that simple acts can help protect civilians against war crimes and crimes against humanity, a responsibility that was enshrined in a 2006 U.N. Security Council resolution but is often seen as impossible to uphold. This is the best kind of conflict prevention.

JJS: One reason governments can so blithely disregard human life is because most human beings surrender without a whimper portions of their property, their earnings, and their time to the state. Exercising such power over others must make our rulers feel freely disposed toward treating unique individuals as merely a mass of pawns. Hence we should put government on a quid pro quo basis and replace arbitrary taxation with user-fees and citizenship dues.

By the way, to keep current on the number of lives lost to war and other violence, one can visit the World Clock. It updates all sorts of statistics, including petroleum extracted and computers produced. Its created by Poodwaddle and found at Chippynews (whatever those two names mean).

Congress’ creature breaks free: Mission creep at the Fed

Wall St. socialism: a brave new Federal Reserve

The author, a conservative and 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner whose columns are syndicated in more than 400 magazines and newspapers worldwide, penned this 2008 article of various titles, the above by the New York Post, April 20. Our addendum shows how to avoid predicaments begging for bailouts.

by George F. Will

Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice . . . - Robert Frost

And some say it will end because of subprime mortgages. But for those who cultivate fear of catastrophe as an excuse for expanding government supervision of others lives, the bad news is that the world is not going to end. This untethered Federal Reserve will, however, make the muddle-through interesting.

The late Sen. William Proxmire wanted all members of Congress to write on their bathroom mirrors, so it is the first thing they read each day, this: “The Fed is a creature of Congress.” Congress created the Federal Reserve pursuant to its constitutional power “to coin money” and “regulate the value thereof.”

But the Fed is undergoing “mission creep.” The description of the Fed is the “lender of last resort”. Lender to whom? For what? Last resort before what? Did the bank “lend” $29 billion to Bear Stearns, or did it, in effect, buy some of the most problematic securities owned by Bear? If so, was this faux “loan” actually to JP Morgan Chase, the buyer of Bear?

In 1979, when the government undertook to rescue Chrysler, conservatives worried not that the bailout would fail but that it would work, thereby inflaming government’s interventionist proclivities and lowering public resistance to future flights of Wall Street socialism. It “worked”: Chrysler has survived to endure its current crisis.

The argument then was that Chrysler was “too big to be allowed to fail.” The argument now is that Bear Stearns was so enmeshed in the financial system that no one could guess the radiating consequences of its failure. But how can the Fed or Washington determine a distressed firms crucial role or vital size?

The Fed’s mission is to preserve the currency as a store of value by preventing inflation. The Fed has no mandate to be the dealmaker for Wall Street socialism. Its duty is not to avoid a recession at all costs; engaging in frenzied improvisations because a small recession, aka a correction, is deemed intolerable, is how to get a big recession.

After the tech bubble burst in 2000, the Fed opened the money spigot to lower interest rates and keep the economy humming. And since the bursting of the housing bubble, which was partly caused by that opened spigot, the Fed has again lowered interest rates, which for now are lower than the inflation rate, which the open spigot will aggravate.

A surge of inflation might mean the end of the world as we have known it. Twenty-six percent of the $9.4 trillion of US debt is held by foreigners. Suppose they construe Fed policy as intentionally increasing inflation, meaning devaluation — partial repudiation — of the US debt. If foreign holders of Treasury notes start to sell them, and if government hopes to keep living off borrowing, it will have to raise the return on it bonds to attract foreign money. But can the US keep devoting an ever growing share of its budget to servicing its debt?

Can taxpayers pay higher taxes while sinking deeper into debt? Having maxed out many of their 1.4 billion credit cards, between 2001 and 2006 Americans tapped $1.2 trillion of their housing equity. The middle-class debt-to-income ratio is now 141%, double that of 1983.

If Congress cannot suppress its itch to “do something” while markets are correcting the prices of housing and money, Congress could pass a law saying: No company benefiting from a substantial federal subvention (which would now include Morgan) may pay any executive more than the highest pay of a federal civil servant ($124,010). That would dampen Wall Street’s enthusiasm for measures that socialize losses while keeping profits private.

JJS: If the rationale for bailing out the bigs is to protect the littles, then why not just protect the littles directly, since the bigs dont need any help? A rich guy losing vaults of mullah yet remaining a millionaire is not a social problem. Anybody else losing their home and ending up on the street or in a relatives basement, that is a social problem.

So lose the Fed, handcuff discretionary spending by politicians, and pay citizens a dividend from surplus public revenue. Government would have lots of surplus if itd do two things: One, cut the waste — the militarism, the drug war, the free infrastructure for sprawl. And two, dont tax labor or capital but recover the values of land, resources, and EM spectrum.

Heck, nature is our common heritage, and her economic value is a socially-generated value, so for government to recover and disburse social surplus makes sense for moral reasons, too.

While terrorists invest with remunerative results ..

US military spending can be completely counterproductive

The so-called Patriot Act scares dollar holdings into euros. The Bushies pay off the same militia they accuse Iran of funding. And the US spends more on weapons that may not ever work than on occupying Iraq. We trim, blend, and append three 2008 articles: (1) Why the West Lost the Financial War against Terror by Loretta Napoleoni; (2) Things Unsaid at the Petraeus Hearings by Ivan Eland, posted at the Independent Institute, April 14; and (3) Bush Administration Wastes Trillions in Worthless Weapons by Robert Scheer, posted on Truthdig, April 3. Napoleoni, author of Terror Incorporated and Rogue Economics, advises several governments on counter-terrorism and was recently interviewed by Newsweek.com. Eland has been an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq.

by Jeffery J. Smith, April 2008

Napoleoni: Money has never been a problem for al-Qaeda, not because its leader is a Saudi millionaire but because they invest in the legal and illegal economy of the countries where they operate. In Pakistani, the city of Quetta, which is their new HQ, is a huge market for counterfeits and contraband in Central Asia. Their main sources of revenues are:

* of the 4 to 5 billion dollars worth of petrol per year that Iraq imports, terrorists and mafias steal 30% and re-sell it on the black market at home or in neighbouring countries;

* kidnapping is booming; most of the people who are kidnapped are Iraqis;

* smuggling then reselling small arms and light weapons from Saddams huge arsenal in places like Somalia and Lebanon.

The UN Security Council Resolutions 1333 and 1267, which pre-date 9/11, and the Patriot Act have failed to cut Al Qaeda off from international banks. The rules tried to freeze funds of individuals linked to al Qaeda. Big businessmen escaped thanks to the refusal of Eastern countries to comply and the reluctance of Western countries to investigate their global finances. Others got out of dollar investment and bought euros to avoid been screened by the American monetary authorities.

More important, the number of business and charities which al Qaeda had infiltrated in the West was very small. In the East, on the other hand, al Qaeda organized the Dawah network — a web of radical Salafist charities and businesses, constructed with Saudi money, dating back to the late 1980s. Osama bin Laden was one of its main brokers. The technique is to infiltrate the economy of a weak or failed state and use large investments to reshape it. Dawah spread al Qaedas violent creed, the Wahhabi doctrine, across the Muslim world.

Some call for an independent international monitoring body on terrorist financing, which could investigate and report on what is happening in all regions of the world, where both Muslims and non-Muslim countries would be represented.

Eland: According to General David H. Petraeus, the latest worst threat to the US military in Iraq is Iranian-backed militia. This allegation coupled with the firing of Admiral William Fallon as commander-in-chief of US forces in the Middle East, who was an opponent of any attack on Iran, raise worries about a cowboy attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office. Yet the US-backed Shiite government and its associated militias are the same ones backed by Iran.

The US is also paying off the Sunni and nationalist Mahdi Army enemies. Bolstering these militias will, in the long run, exacerbate any civil war when they again begin to fight each other.

The botched Iraqi government offensive in Basra was beginning to flip a few Republicans against the war. They adopted the Democrats argument that Iraqis were failing to do enough to become democratic. Although it is grossly unfair to invade a country, destroy its social fabric and economy, and then expect people who have had no experience in democracy to quickly become democrats, if it takes those rhetorical gymnastics to justify a more rapid US withdrawal, so be it.

Scheer: The Government Accountability Office again documented the enormous waste in every single US advanced weapons system, as did five equally scathing previous annual audits. That’s a grade of zero for every major weapons system.

The peace dividend promised with the end of the Cold War, was washed away by a doubling of spending on military equipment. Funding the Iraq war pales in comparison to purchases of weaponry in the wake of 9/11. Yet the purchases, such as the $81-billion submarine, have no connection to fighting stateless terrorists.

Pentagon cost overruns, always a huge problem, have mushroomed. Total acquisition costs for major defense programs in the fiscal year 2007 portfolio have increased 26% from first estimates, compared with 6% in 2000.

Military spending accounts for more than half of all the federal government’s discretionary spending.

The Iraq war may end someday, but major weapons systems have a life-support system unmatched in any other sector of public spending. Rarely does the plug get pulled on even the most irrelevant war toy. Not while so much is at stake in the way of jobs and profit.

JJS: So lets not tax jobs and profit. Lets augment wages and profits by paying ourselves a dividend from surplus public revenue from cutting spending on militarism. We can amass the funds by using taxes, fees, and leases to redirect all our spending on land, resources, and privilege into the public treasury.

Advertise here.

Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

about the money we spend on the nature we use. It flows torrentially yet invisibly, often submerged in the price of housing, food, fuel, and everything else. Flowing from the many to the few, natural rent distorts prices and rewards unjust and unsustainable choices. Redirected via dues and dividends to flow from each to all, “rent” payments would level the playing field and empower neighbors to shrink their workweek and expand their horizons. Modeled on nature’s feedback loops, earlier proposals to redirect rent found favor with Paine, Tolstoy, and Einstein. Wherever tried, to the degree tried, redirecting rent worked. One of today’s versions, the green tax shift, spreads out of Europe. Another, the Property Tax Shift, activists can win at the local level, building a world that works right for everyone.

a POV that Spain’s president might try. A few blocks from my room in Madrid at a book fair to promote literacy, Sr Zapatero, while giving autographs and high fives to kids, said books are very expensive and he’d see about getting the value added tax on them cut down to zero. (El Pais, June 4; see, politicians can grasp geo-logic.) But why do we raise the cost of any useful product? Why not tax useless products? Even more basic: is being better than a costly tax good enough? Our favorite replacement for any tax is no tax: instead, run government like a business and charge full market value for the permits it issues, such as everything from corporate charters to emission allowances to resource leases. These pieces of paper are immensely valuable, yet now our steward, the state, gives them away for nearly free, absolutely free in some cases. Government is sitting on its own assets and needs merely to cash in by doing what any rational entity in the economy does – negotiate the best deal. Then with this profit, rather than fund more waste, pay the stakeholders, we citizenry, a dividend. Thereby geonomics gets rid of two huge problems. It replaces taxes with full-value fees and replaces subsidies for special interests with a Citizens Dividend for people in general. Neither left nor right, this reform is what both nature lovers and liberty lovers need to promote, right now.

a manual. The world did not come without a way for people to prosper, and the planet to heal and stay well; that way is geonomics. Economies are part of the ecosystem. Both generate surpluses and follow self-regulating feedback loops. A cycle like the Law of Supply and Demand is one of the economy’s on/off loops. Our spending for land and resources – things that nobody made and everybody needs – constitutes our society’s surplus. Those profits without production (remember, nobody produced Earth) can become our commonwealth. To share it, we could pay land dues in to the public treasury (wouldn’t oil companies love that?) and get rent dividends back, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Doing so let’s us axe taxes and jettison subsidies. Taxes and subsidies distort price (the DNA of exchange), violate quid pro quo by benefiting the well-connected more than anyone else, reinforce hierarchy of state over citizen, and are costly to administer (you don’t really need so much bureaucracy, do you?). Conversely, land dues motivate people to not waste sites, resources, and the ecosystem while rent dividends motivate people to not waste themselves. Receiving this income supplement – a Citizens Dividend – people can invest in their favorite technology or outgrow being “economan” and shrink their overbearing workweek in order to enjoy more time with family, friends, community, and nature. Then in all that free time, maybe we could figure out just what we are here for.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a new field of study offered in place of economics, as astronomy replaced astrology and chemistry replaced alchemy. Conventional economics, in which GNP can do well while people suffer, is a bit too superstitious for my renaissance upbringing. If I’m to propitiate unseen forces, it won’t be inflation or “the market”; let it be theEgyptian cat goddess. At least then we’d have fewer rats. Meanwhile, believing in reason leads to a new policy, also christened geonomics. That’s the proposal to share (a kind of management, the “nomics” part) the worth of Mother Earth (the “geo” part). If our economies are to work right, people need to see prices that tell the truth. Now taxes and subsidies distort prices, tricking people into squandering the planet. Using land dues and rent dividends instead lets prices be precise, guiding people to get more from less and thereby shrink their workweek. More free time ought to make us happy enough to evolve beyond economics, except when nostalgic for superstition.

the policy that the earth’s natural patterns suggests. Use the eco-system’s self-regulating feedback loops as a model. What then needs changing? Basically, the flow of money spent to own or use Earth (both sites and resources) must visit each of us. Our agent, government, exists to collect this natural rent via fees and to disburse the collected revenue via dividends. Doing this, we could forgo taxes on homes and earnings and subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. For more, see our web site, our pamphlet of the title above, or any of our other lit pieces; ask for our literature list.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

what you do when you see economies as part of the ecosystem, following feedback loops and storing up energy. Surplus energy – fat or profit – enables us to produce and reproduce. To recycle society’s surplus, the commonwealth, geonomics would replace taxes with land dues (charged to users of sites and resources, in-cluding the EM spectrum, and extra to polluters), and replace subsidies with rent dividends to citizens (a la Alaska’s oil dividend). Without taxes and subsidies to distort them, prices become precise, reflect accurately our costs and values; then, motivated by no more than the bottom line, both producers and consumers make sustainable choices. While no place uses geonomics in its entirety, some places use parts of it, most notably a shift of the property tax off buildings, onto locations. Shifting the property tax drives efficient use of land, in-fills cities, improves the housing stock, makes homes affordable, engenders jobs and investment opportunities, lowers crime, raises civic participation, etc – overall it makes cities more livable. Geonomics – a way to share the bounty of nature and society – is something we can work for locally, globally, and in between.

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

an alternative to conventional land trusts. Just as it seems some functions should not be left to the market – private courts and cops invite corruption (while private mediation is fine) – just so some land should not be left in the market. That said, sacred sites do not make much of a model for treating the vast acreage of land that we need to use. So the usual trust model, which is anti-use and counter-market, can not apply where it’s needed most. Trust proponents worry about ownership and control – two very human ambitions – but they’re not central. Supposedly, we the people own millions acres – acres that private corporations treat as private fiefdoms – and conversely, the Nature Conservancy owns wilderness the public can some places use as parks. So, the issue is not who owns but who gets the rent – ideally, all of us.